Another day, another conversation with the press team where I explain that I did not give the quote in that story and the whole thing is AI slop. This happens once every few weeks now.

@vegard back in the early 2000s, when the MPAA and DVD CCS battles were raging, a friend of mine had a shirt with the CCS decryption key on the back and "I am a circumvention device" on the front. It was very nerdy, but then he abruptly stopped wearing it. When I asked why, he explained that, apparently, a waiter misread it as "I am a circumcision device," which, you have to agree, gives that shirt a whole different meaning.

Anyway, the moral is, be careful when putting nerdy phrases on your shirts. :)

Toki pona takes one afternoon to learn and (checks notes) never to master.

(If you don't know what it is, it's basically like a caveman language, except the cavemen are cute cartoon characters with a very positive outlook on everything.)

Geordi,

The replicator doesn't work. All I said was "Computer, prune juice."

Worf

@vbabka yes, but it's not drive-by, it's at least targeted.

My prediction for 2026: a lot more open-source projects switch to email-based patch workflows as the only reliable way to avoid drive-by slopsplatter.

/nsrs

@ptesarik @kernellogger @ljs Linus and Dave have known each-other for decades and their relationship has a much deeper context than their exchange on the mailing lists. Within that context, Linus's comment is entirely within the boundaries of their friendly relationship. Outside of that context, Linus's remark could be seen as hurtful, but it really isn't. This is the reason some people use tone indicator markers, but it's definitely not a universal habit.

https://toneindicators.carrd.co/#masterlist

@kees @penguin42 Everyone knows that the trailer for "Assisted-by: vim" is a stray :wq at the bottom of the commit message.

@kees @ptesarik @krzk You call it "awkward," I call it "a process with built-in proof of stake measures."

@sysadmin1138 @kaasbaas @cstross

"This is an iPhone moment" was mentioned A LOT in the early throes of this, with the implication of not getting in on the LLM craze meant you'd be a candy-bar phone seller in an era of smartphones

I really can't understate how much FOMO dominates in big tech leadership. The history of information technology is full of disruptive technologies.

The PC made IBM a niche player and established Microsoft's dominance.

Microsoft missed out on the web (Gates famously called the Internet a passing fad) and let Google become one of the largest tech companies.

Smartphones made Apple from a distant second place in the PC race and a company worth a fraction of Microsoft to one of the largest companies in the world.

Each one of these (and a few others, such as virtualisation / cloud) caused a big company to lose market share to a new player. Sometime catastrophically, sometimes they recovered.

The thing that absolutely terrifies the senior leadership at these companies is that there will be a new thing that will cause a big shift in the industry and they will be in the position Microsoft was on the web or smartphones, or that IBM was on commodity desktops.

These people are typically the living embodiment of the Peter Principle.
Normally, they can do a completely mediocre job and watch the line go up a bit. As long as they don't do too many really stupid things, they're fine. They're in charge of a money fountain and they just need to not spill too much. But occasionally, once or twice a decade, something comes along where they need to actually do something or the money fountain might stop working.

The problem is that they're really bad at identifying these moments. And so they leap on everything that looks as if it plausibly might be such a thing. Normally they only waste a billion or so, and wasting a billion every few years is not a problem for a company making tens of billions in profit every year.

This time, they got into an exciting echo chamber where everyone else was jumping on the same bandwagon and so the personal risk if they were the one who didn't jump and was wrong was very high. The risk (again, to the individuals, not the company) of being wrong in the same way as everyone else is much lower (who could possibly predict that pissing away all of your money on a buggy bullshit generator is a bad idea? Everyone else is doing it! It wasn't my poor management that tanked the value of the company, it was an 'industry downturn', you can tell because all of our major competitors also lost 50% of their share price overnight. Oh, and actually it isn't really a tech industry problem, it's a global recession [caused by a liquidity crunch caused by wiping out $2T in the stock market overnight]).

The last few things that were not actually disruptive technologies (mixed reality / AR / metaverse, Web 3) were similar. One company jumped so all of the others did. No one looked bad when it turned out to be mostly nonsense because no one was the outlier, they were just tracking industry trends.

The weird thing this time is quite how much people are willing to throw money at it without any revenue. It's like a massive game of chicken, except it's the economy not a car that they're going to crash.

@forst it costs almost nothing to run a bunch of DNS queries and to analyze curl HEAD requests, so even if the chances of any kind of payout are near-zero, it's still worth someone's time to try and milk it.

@FLOZz Sweet dreams are made of this.

Hi:

Thank you for reporting that (checks) our SPF record has `~all` instead of `-all`. This is clearly a grave and inexcusable failing on our part and not at all intentional.

We will now gladly pay you a bounty of one hundred billion dollars for finding and responsibly disclosing this dangerous vulnerability to us.

/s

Anyone sharing anything about phones always listening to your conversations and showing you adverts about that:

(a) Do you realise how incredibly easy it is to monitor all the traffic coming from your phone?
(b) Do you understand how giant a scandal it would be if that were demonstrated?
(c) Do you know how many people there are who would love to be at the confluence of (a) and (b) and yet have not been because it's not a thing that's happening?

I can tell you whether Twitter's new encrypted DMs are secure or not before they're launched and I can also tell you that Facebook isn't keeping your phone CPU on all the time and streaming the audio back to target adverts better. There's plenty of ways they *do* violate privacy expectations, this isn't one of them.

If you haven't presented at a conference before, BSides Oslo 2025 is a great first conference to do it. When you submit a proposal for a presentation, you can opt-in to be paired with a mentor that will help you develop your presentation. https://forms.gle/M5BfbGpqhdmZL29N6

@semiprime I'm 100% sure this is what happened. The triple-dash bullet points, the emdash in the closing and the phrasing screams LLM-generated content.

@Lalufu mmm.. but we'd never agree on the kind of composite decking to use for the bike shed, so I feel this is not going to make things any better.

@rtzoeller deck the holes with mem'ry fences, tra-la-la-la-la la-la la-la?